Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology similar to barcode for unique identification of an item, yet using wireless technology so that there is no need to optically line-of-sight observe the barcode, is now in initial widespread adoption throughout the world. There are a number of US patents touching on such technology, including U.S. Pat. No. 4,075,632, U.S. Pat. No. 4,739,328, U.S. Pat. No. 5,030,807, U.S. Pat. No. 5,777,561, U.S. Pat. No. 5,828,693, U.S. Pat. No. 5,850,181, U.S. Pat. No. 5,912,632, U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,019, U.S. Pat. No. 6,154,136, U.S. Pat. No. 6,288,629, U.S. Pat. No. 6,400,274 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,429,775.
There are however many hurdles to wider use of the technology. The difficulty of application of RFID to different environment and business processes pose a great challenge to the system integrators in the world. The fact that RFID reading operation requires the combined interdisciplinary knowledge of RF circuits, antennas, propagation, scattering, system, middleware, server software, and business process engineering is so overwhelming that it is hard to find one single system integrator knowledgeable about them all. Users are then forced to contract multiple companies to build the RFID infrastructure, and the inevitable difficulty in communication between companies slow down the deployment rate.
In view of the aforesaid situation, this present invention seeks to create and introduce novel technologies, namely redundant networked multimedia technology, auto-ranging technology, auto-planning technology, smart active antenna technology, plus novel RFID tag technology, to consolidate the knowledge of all these different disciplines into a comprehensive product family. An expert system like installation, monitoring and maintenance infrastructure thus link up all these technologies. The ultimate goal is to advance the state-of-the-art in RFED system and increase the ease of deployment, speed of deployment, and reliability of deployment of RFID system throughout the world.
The application of these RFID technologies include, but is not limited to, logistics, warehouse management, parking lot management, golf ball tracking, clothing and fashion industry, factory automation, produce tracking, baggage tracking, document management, human access control and tracking, etc. Actually, the fact that these technologies arise from these actual applications can probably be intuitively guessed from the description of the patent application.